David Kernell left a fenceless minimum-security federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, where inmates are put to work on landscaping and building maintenance for between $0.12 and $0.40 per hour for the halfway house, according to a Tennessee television station.

Kernell was convicted last year of breaking into to Palin's Yahoo e-mail account during the 2008 presidential election. He outsmarted Yahoo's password reset system by correctly answering questions using information about Palin that was easily available on the Internet — a technique that criminals continue to use to break into those accounts. Apparently it took Kernell minutes to look up her birth date, Zip code and where she met her husband Todd (Wasilla High School).

When they don't make any money from the crime, it's unusual for first-time hackers with no criminal records to get a prison sentence, but Kernell's case wasn't exactly typical. Palin and her eldest daughter Bristol testified during the trial, and prosecutors argued that a stiff sentence would deter further hacking during presidential elections.

Kernell is now in the custody of the Nashville Community Corrections Office, and is set to finish his sentence on Nov. 23, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Don’t Hollow Out the Military – The fiscal profligacy of President Obama and his allies on Capitol Hill may tempt Republicans in Congress to agree to deep — and, in General Dempsey’s words, “high risk” — defense cuts today in exchange for long-term reductions in entitlements down the road. This would be a mirage.

America’s defense is too important to become a political football in the budget battles. Rather, any cuts in defense spending should be the result of a careful, dispassionate assessment of the risks we and our allies face. A global risk assessment should inform a defense strategy that adequately manages those risks, and such a strategy should lead to a budget that can keep America safe.

Making portentous decisions on any other basis risks gravely weakening our defenses and demonstrating to foes and friends alike a lack of resolve that ensures we will face more of the former with fewer of the latter. As history has repeatedly shown, such weakness only serves to invite aggression. The mortal threats that result would certainly prove far costlier than the defenses that would have prevented them.

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Lemonade Crackdown – By Iain Murray – In the past couple of months, police have put children’s lemonade stands out of business in Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. (There’s a great map, with links to the news stories, here.)

The kids have been taught a lesson, but it’s one we should learn, too: You can’t be an entrepreneur in modern-day America without bureaucrats giving you permission in the first place.

The costs of regulation today amount to $10,000 per employee per year for small businesses in the U.S. That’s why the advert where a little girl borrows her father’s phone to help run her lemonade stand and ends up running a multinational just can’t happen. The bureaucrats just wouldn’t let her do it without jumping through the costly bureaucratic hoops first.

If we want to get America back to work, we need to lighten up on the lemonade stands, lighten up on small businesses, and stop the bureaucrats destroying free enterprise.

The Government War On Kid-Run Concession Stands – August 1, 2011 – Police officers in Coralville, Iowa, ordered at least three different sets of children to quit selling lemonade during the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa unless they first got a vendor’s permit and a health inspection. This is the first known example of a coordinated set of shutdowns at a single time.
July 19, 2011 – McAllen, Texas shuts down girls’ lemonade stand for failure to obtain food permit, may assess grandmother $50 fine.
July 17, 2011 – Police in Appleton, Wisconsin inform children that despite legally selling lemonade and cookies in their front yard during an annual city festival for the past six or seven years, a new city ordinance bans these sales in order to protect licensed vendors from competition.
July 15, 2011 – Cops in Midway, Georgia shut down a lemonade stand some kids were running in their own front yard, saying the kids had to obtain a peddler’s license, a food license, and pay $50 per day for a temporary business permit.
June 16, 2011 – County Inspector in Maryland closes kids’ lemonade stand, fines parents $500.

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Northern California mother faces murder charge over Meth breast milk – Prosecutors in Northern California have upgraded charges against a woman accused of feeding her son methamphetamine-laced breast milk to murder, rather than manslaughter.
Six-week-old Michael Acosta III was taken to the hospital after he stopped breathing last November and was pronounced dead. Investigators determined his mother, Maggie Jean Wortman, had breastfed the child while she had drugs in her system.
After a preliminary hearing last month, a judge ordered Wortman to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment.
Humboldt County prosecutors say evidence introduced during that hearing led to the upgraded charges this week. Deputy District Attorney Ben McLaughlin told the Times-Standard of Eureka (http://bit.ly/r746ea ) that Wortman's recklessness warranted the murder charge.
Defense attorney M.C. Bruce says the facts don't support that. He plans to seek to have the charge reduced.

The 12-member super committee, comprised of an equal number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, was created by the debt-limit legislation signed into law Tuesday, and is responsible for identifying $1.2 trillion in spending cuts by Thanksgiving. But the law doesn’t require the committee’s meetings to be open to the public.

In their letter, Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), John Boozman (Ark.), Dean Heller (Nev.), Ron Johnson (Wisc.), Mike Lee (Utah), and David Vitter (La.) urged Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to make sure members of the public receive advanced notice of meetings, are able to attend them and can watch live broadcasts.

Reid, McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will each appoint three members to the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction.

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Obama: Still the Alinskyite – Obama is a bad negotiator because Alinskyite’s don’t negotiate, they intentionally polarize. As for their own groups, here they try to placate all factions and hide their own goals. That about describes Obama’s performance on the debt deal, which included a dollop of both of these stances.

I’ve laid it all out in Radical-in-Chief, from standard Alinskyite operating procedure, to Obama’s own use of it in Chicago, to the contradictions inherent in the attempt to apply these lessons to the presidency. As far as I can tell, Obama is still moving according to this Alinskyite template. In his own words, it was his true political education. It’s still the key to what he’s up to.

Work on this air traffic control tower under construction has been
stopped Tuesday, July 26, 2011, at the Oakland International Airport in
Oakland, Calif. Since a partial shutdown of the FAA took effect Friday,
the agency has furloughed nearly 4,000 workers, stopped the processing
of about $2.5 billion in airport construction grants, and issued stop
work orders to construction and other contractors on more than 150
projects, from airport towers to runway safety lights

The Senate will pass the House’s bill to fund the Federal Aviation Administration through September to end the week-and-a-half-long partial shutdown of the agency, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced Thursday.

Under a deal Reid made with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Senate will pass the House bill that includes cuts to rural flight service to airports in Nevada, West Virginia and Montana. But Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will use his authority to waive the airports from the cuts, ending a 13-day impasse that left 4,000 FAA employees and about 70,000 construction employees out of work.

Reid said the deal did not solve the issues that led to the partial shutdown of the FAA, but he said those can be dealt with another day.

“I am pleased to announce that we have been able to broker a bipartisan compromise between the House and the Senate to put 74,000 transportation and construction workers back to work,” Reid said in a statement released by his office. “This agreement does not resolve the important differences that still remain. But I believe we should keep Americans working while Congress settles its differences, and this agreement will do exactly that.”

But, the White House was obstinate, President Obama was playing around giving birthday fundraising speeches in Chicago and folks realized they were not working because of what the White House wanted. Hence, the Obama Administration got caught with their pro-labor ideology exposed again.

The House and Senate passed a 20th short-term extension of FAA funding in May when the chambers both passed versions of the longer-term bills that were drastically different. The House version included provisions that would undo changes to labor rules that were adopted by the National Mediation Board to make it easier for railroad and airline workers to unionize.

The chambers passed an extension through July 22 when President Obama issued a veto threat of the larger bill.

But as July 22 approached, House leaders added a provision to what would have been a 21st extension that cut subsidies for rural flight service to airports in Nevada, West Virginia and Montana. Noting the airports were in the districts of the Senate Majority Leader Reid, Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Democrats accused Republicans of retaliating politically for the Senate’s objection to the labor provision.

The partial shutdown of the FAA, which last thirteen days, was estimated to have cost the federal government $30 million per day because the agency was not authorized to collect taxes that would normally be paid on airline ticket sales.

Transportation observers estimate the shutdown has also placed about 70,000 construction workers out of work because about 200 airport construction projects have been placed on hold.

“It’s been a long, tough journey. But we have made some incredible strides together. Yes, we have. But the thing that we all ought to remember is that as much as good as we have done, precisely because the challenges were so daunting, precisely because we we were inheriting so many challenges, that we’re not even halfway there yet. When I said ‘change we can believe in’ I didn’t say ‘change we can believe in tomorrow.’ Not change we can believe in next week. We knew this was going to take time because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy,”

Unbelievable and Obama continues to blame President Bush.

Good luck with that re-election effort and is there any wonder why he is way down in the polls?